End of Season Bounty

Summer is drawing to a close here.  I can feel it in the cooler evenings and shorter days.  The trees have begun to display their fall fireworks up and down the mountains nearby.  Just a few days ago a rainstorm down here in the valley brought snow to the higher elevations and dusted the tops of the mountains to the south and east of me.  I fear that it won't be long until the snow flies here as well.

In the meantime I have been keeping busy trying to keep up with all the harvests in the garden.  Here and there I have been pulling up carrots as I need them and these beauties went into a batch of chicken stock that I was working on today.

The pickling cucumbers have slowed down considerably, but they are still producing.  They are showing signs of powdery mildew, but I think they will be able to hang on until the first frost.

The tomatoes are finally starting to ripen in larger numbers, though if they wait too much longer they will all end up ripening in my kitchen when the weather gets too cold.  This round of harvesting will get to ripen for a couple more days until I can find the time to turn them into salsa.

The peppers are producing very heavily right now.  Today I went through and picked the largest and most ripe of them, but I left plenty on the plants so they could continue to change into their final colors.  

 All of the sweet chili peppers went into the freezer today, but I left out the bell peppers for when I make salsa again in a few days.  I already have three gallon bags packed tightly with frozen peppers in the freezer and I will probably get at least three more in there before they are done for the year.

 The tops of the peppers that didn't make it into the freezer were chopped into smaller pieces and spread out on a tray for the dehydrator.  I want to try making a dry salsa mix from my left over pepper pieces and using up the tops means that I waste even less of my hard earned harvest.

This week at the farmers market I got some good deals on the local fruit grower's end of season crops as well.  I had been wanting to get more plums from the market to make a second batch of plum wine and was rewarded with the very last box of plums for the season for $10.  They were over ripe and some were beginning to go bad, but they were going to be fermenting so that didn't matter as much.  I simply picked through the box and scrubbed the keepers before I pitted and chopped them to begin the wine making process.

 All in all I wound up with about twelve pounds of plums that were usable from the whole box.  I won't be making a large batch of wine from this many plums, but I hope to get at least nine or ten bottles of wine for my trouble. 

The other final fruit crop that I was able to snag at the market was the last pears of the season.  I only had a couple of jars of canned pears from this year and wanted more, so I bought up all the pears that they had left.  They are still green yet, but they will ripen over the next few days and I should be able to find time to can them before they go bad.

Winter will be here before too long, so I am happy to fill my days preserving the bounty of my labors.  Every week I am putting more filled jars on my shelves and bags of veggies in my freezer.  It is becoming a balancing act of having enough space for everything and having enough time to process it all.  I have been going through older things in my freezer and trying to use them up to make room for all of the incoming produce.  Not everything that goes into the freezer will be staying there all winter, but freezing crops like tomatoes really helps because once they are frozen I can process and can them at my leisure.  These last few weeks before the first frost can be hectic with all that needs to get done and I look forward to the break that is coming with the colder weather.